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by tombert 348 days ago
They're not hard but I will say that when I was writing an app that was using both JavaScript and Julia, I kept getting off-by-one errors because Julia starts at 1 instead of 0.

Really the only time in my entire professional career that off-by-one errors have actually given me headaches.
1 comments
bobthepanda 347 days ago
I think that is from a time when popular programming languages varied in their behavior and also when people were writing for loops with incrementation all the time.

A lot of languages have just settled on zero indexing, and many now have some variation of for/each or for/of that would eliminate a lot of potential ways to encounter this error.

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tombert 347 days ago
Yeah, I mostly will do map/reduce/filter when possible, and obviously in those cases indexes don’t matter. It could start at index 12345 for all I care with that stuff.

Occasionally, though, I need to use the same index across multiple items, there’s not a trivial means in which to zip, and at that point I have to use an old school for loop. That’s when the 1-index vs 0-index bites me.

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